Executive mentoring is a process that involves the building of individual capacities in executives and prospective executives through the teachings or coaching of an assigned mentor. Diverse people benefit from the process of executive mentoring. Such people include junior executives in organizations who wish to improve their leadership and decision-making skills and even students who take executive mentoring as a part of their prerequisites for attaining a degree.
An example of a situation that requires executive mentoring is in an organization where individuals who may have been selected for promotion are assigned to a mentor. The mentor serves as a sort of coach or teacher to the individual on matters concerning the requirements of good executives. Such teachings necessarily involve practical demonstrations where the student or junior executive will be involved in some of the activities that will help him or her further develop skills he or she already possess. Part of such activities include allowing the junior executive to observe and learn from high-level meetings involving the top directors of a company, and teaching the junior executive the principles of bargaining and the process of oral persuasion and rhetoric.
When the person to benefit from the executive mentoring is a student, the mentor will be assigned to the student during the beginning of the necessary course. Such a mentor will engage the student in various forms of executive mentoring over the course of the program. For instance, the mentor could invite the student on field trips where the student will be allowed to observe contract negotiations and other forms of interaction between the mentor and other business owners in the area. This is very important to the student, not just because it allows for the development of skills, but also because the student will be able to network and create potential contacts who may be of benefit upon graduation.
Businesses benefit from any investment in executive mentoring, which is also a type of human capital investment. Such an investment will yield dividends in the form of an improvement in the skills of workers, their ability to perform their executive duties more effectively, and their ability to provide competent leadership to the workers whom they oversee. Junior executives also benefit from executive mentoring because they learn how to set personal and professional short-term and long-term goals toward the attainment of stated objectives in their jobs or careers.